A Landscape Older Than Memory
Dartmoor is ancient. Not in the way that a cathedral or a castle is ancient — those are human structures imposed upon the land. Dartmoor is ancient in a deeper sense. The granite that makes up its tors was formed roughly 280 million years ago, pushed up through the earth's crust and then slowly eroded by wind, rain, and frost into the strange, stacked formations we see today. Walk across the moor and you are walking on the bones of the earth.
But what makes Dartmoor truly extraordinary is not just its geology. It is the fact that people have been living here, building here, and telling stories about this place for at least four thousand years. Dartmoor has the highest concentration of Bronze Age remains in Britain. Stone circles, burial cairns, stone rows, hut settlements, and field boundaries are scattered across its 368 square miles of open moorland — a vast, open-air museum where prehistory is not behind glass but right there under your boots.
This is our guide to Dartmoor's ancient history — the sites you can visit, the legends they have inspired, and why exploring them with friends makes the whole experience richer.
The Prehistoric Sites
Grimspound: A Bronze Age Village
Grimspound is the best-known prehistoric settlement on Dartmoor, and it is remarkable. English Heritage dates it to the late Bronze Age, probably somewhere between about 1500 and 800 BC. It consists of the remains of 24 stone roundhouses enclosed within a massive boundary wall roughly 150 metres in diameter — surviving up to 1.5 metres high and averaging three metres thick — with more houses outside the enclosure. The settlement sits in a hollow around 450 metres above sea level, on the slopes between Hameldown Tor and Hookney Tor, sheltered from the worst of Dartmoor's weather.
Each house was built of a double ring of granite slabs with a rubble infill — a technique still used in dry-stone walling today. When the Dartmoor Exploration Committee excavated 16 of the houses at the end of the 19th century, they found porches, paved floors, hearths, raised benches, cooking holes, charcoal, pottery, and flint. These were proper homes. People cooked here, slept here, raised their children here.
Archaeologists believe the inhabitants were pastoral farmers, herding cattle, sheep, and goats on the surrounding moorland. By about 1000 BC, the settlement pattern was changing. The people had cleared the forest, exposing the fragile moorland soil to erosion, and the moor could no longer sustain the same level of occupation. They moved on, and Grimspound fell silent.
What makes Grimspound so powerful to visit is that you can walk among the ruins and immediately understand the layout. You can see where the entrance was, where individual families lived, where they kept their animals. It is managed by English Heritage and is free to visit — just park near the road between Widecombe-in-the-Moor and Moretonhampstead and walk across the moor.
Grimspound is best visited as part of a longer walk. Combine it with a hike to Hameldown Tor for panoramic views, then descend to Widecombe-in-the-Moor for a pint at the Rugglestone Inn. A Bronze Age settlement followed by a proper pub — that is a Dartmoor day well spent.
Merrivale: Stone Rows and Standing Stones
If Grimspound shows you how people lived on Dartmoor, Merrivale shows you something more mysterious — how they worshipped. This extraordinary ritual complex near Princetown brings together monuments from both the late Neolithic (3000-2300 BC) and the Bronze Age (2300-800 BC), and it is one of the finest collections of prehistoric remains on the moor.
The most prominent features are two double stone rows running east to west. The northern row stretches 182 metres, with more than 150 stones mostly under a metre high. The second row runs roughly parallel but is longer, reaching 263 metres across the moor. There is also a single stone row, a small stone circle, two standing stones, and several cairns associated with burials.
Nobody knows for certain what the stone rows were for. They may have been processional avenues, astronomical alignments, or boundaries marking sacred space. What we do know is that they were important enough for people to spend enormous effort dragging, shaping, and setting these stones over many generations.
Just north of the stone rows are the remains of over 50 roundhouses — a Bronze Age settlement where people were living and farming about 3,000 years ago. The juxtaposition of the domestic and the sacred is fascinating. These people lived their everyday lives within sight of monuments they considered holy.
Merrivale is right beside the B3357 between Princetown and Tavistock, with parking nearby. It is free to visit and managed by English Heritage. If you are visiting with friends who enjoy a good Dartmoor walk, this is an excellent starting point.
Scorhill: Dartmoor's Finest Stone Circle
Scorhill Stone Circle sits on Gidleigh Common in the north-east of Dartmoor, and it has a strong claim to being the finest stone circle on the moor. Part of its appeal is the walk to reach it — about 45 minutes from the nearest parking at Batworthy Corner, across open moorland with views in every direction. You earn this one.
The circle is approximately 27 metres in diameter, with 23 standing stones and 11 lying where they fell. The tallest survivor rises to around 2.25 metres. Estimates put the original number of stones at roughly 60 to 70, suggesting this was once a substantially larger monument — possibly the largest on Dartmoor by stone count. Historic England dates it to the early Bronze Age.
What makes Scorhill special, beyond its size and setting, is that it was spared the attention of Victorian "restorers" who re-erected stones at many other sites (often in the wrong positions). Scorhill is relatively original — what you see is close to what was left after millennia of natural decay, and after stonecutters took what they wanted; several stones still carry the drilled "jumper holes" of quarrymen.
The circle stands near the confluence of the North Teign River with its tributary the Wallabrook, and it is part of a wider ancient landscape that includes six hut circles, three cairns, and a reave (a Bronze Age field boundary of earth and rubble). Local tradition holds that on Midsummer Eve the sun sets behind the tallest standing stone — something that may or may not have been intentional, but which certainly adds to the atmosphere.
Local folklore has its own take on Scorhill. One story says that women who had been unfaithful had to wash in Cranmere Pool, run around the stone circle three times, pass through the nearby Tolmen Stone, and then kneel to pray by the stones for forgiveness. Whether anyone actually did this is another matter entirely.
Bowerman's Nose: The Hunter Turned to Stone
Bowerman's Nose is not a prehistoric monument in the archaeological sense — it is a natural rock formation, a stack of weathered granite standing about 6.6 metres high on the northern slopes of Hayne Down, near the village of Manaton and about a mile from Hound Tor. But the legend attached to it is pure Dartmoor.
The story goes that many years ago there lived a man named Bowerman the Hunter — tall, powerful, and generous to the poor people of the moor. The local witches disliked him, partly because he was not afraid of them and partly because he encouraged others not to be afraid either. One of the witches, named Levera, had the power to turn herself into a hare. She placed herself where Bowerman and his pack of hounds would find her, and led them on a chase around the side of the tor where the other witches were hiding. When the exhausted hunter arrived, he found himself surrounded by shrieking witches who combined to cast a spell, turning Bowerman and his hounds to stone.
According to the legend, his dogs were turned into the clitter — the scattered granite rocks on nearby Hound Tor. In reality, of course, the rock is the eroded core of a former tor that happens to resemble a human profile. But the legend is better than the geology.
The Legends of the Moor
Wistman's Wood and the Wild Hunt
Wistman's Wood is one of Britain's last remaining fragments of ancient temperate rainforest. It sits at an altitude of 380 to 410 metres in the valley of the West Dart River near Two Bridges — a copse of some three and a half hectares of twisted, stunted pedunculate oaks, rarely more than 4.5 metres tall, growing out of moss-covered granite boulders. It is likely a remnant of the ancient forest that covered much of Dartmoor before early humans cleared it, and the oldest oaks appear to be 400 to 500 years old.
Look, don't enter. The wood is a National Nature Reserve and its mosses and lichens — including a horsehair lichen found at only a couple of sites in Britain — are destroyed by feet and by scrambling over the boulders. Since 2023 a restoration scheme run with Natural England has been deliberately reducing both grazing and human foot traffic so the woodland can regenerate. Park opposite the Two Bridges Hotel, walk the track up the valley, and view it from the edge.
The name derives from the Devonshire dialect word wisht, meaning eerie or uncanny — or, in some readings, pixie-haunted. And the legends attached to it are suitably dark. The Wild Hunt, whose hellhounds are known as Yeth Hounds or Wisht Hounds in Devon dialect, is particularly associated with this wood. The story tells of devil hounds that slept by day in the hollows between the boulders and hunted with the devil by night across the open moor.
It was the folk tale of the Wild Hunt, combined with the atmosphere of Wistman's Wood, that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he visited Dartmoor in June 1901 with his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Robinson, a devoted Devon man, showed Doyle the moor and told him tales of spectral hounds. The result was The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of the most famous novels in English literature.
Doyle drew on multiple Dartmoor sources for the novel. He and Robinson visited Grimspound, Childe's Tomb and Fox Tor Mires, the great bog below Fox Tor that is generally taken to be the model for the Grimpen Mire — and which no stranger should attempt to cross. The legend of the hound drew on the story of Richard Cabell of Buckfastleigh, a 17th-century squire who died in 1677 and was said to have been met at his tomb by a pack of phantom hounds. And the brooding, mist-shrouded landscape of the novel is pure Dartmoor — a place where the imagination runs wild whether you want it to or not.
If you are interested in Devon's literary heritage, the Dartmoor connection is just the beginning. From Agatha Christie's Torquay to Ted Hughes's North Tawton, the county has inspired some of the greatest writers in the English language. Read more in our guide to Devon's literary connections.
The Hairy Hands of the B3212
Of all Dartmoor's legends, the tale of the Hairy Hands is perhaps the most unsettling — not least because it is relatively modern. Since around 1910, drivers and cyclists on the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges have reported suffering unusual accidents. In many cases, victims described their vehicle jolting or swerving violently, as if something had taken hold of the steering wheel or handlebars and wrenched control away from them.
The legend gained national attention in 1921. In June that year E.H. Helby, the medical officer for Dartmoor Prison, was killed after losing control of his motorcycle combination on this stretch of road; the two children riding in the sidecar survived. That August an army officer told the papers a pair of invisible hands had seized his handlebars and forced him off the same road, and it was that account which the London press picked up and made national. A few years later a woman camping on the moor with her husband reported seeing a hairy hand at the window of their caravan during the night. She said it retreated when she made the sign of the Cross.
The rational explanation points to the curve and camber of the road — a driver unfamiliar with the area might attribute the steering movements caused by sudden changes in the road surface to a sensation of control being ripped away. But on a dark November evening, driving alone between Postbridge and Two Bridges with mist closing in, the rational explanation feels less convincing than it does in daylight.
Pixies, Piskies, and Being Pixie-Led
Dartmoor's pixies — or piskies, in the Devon dialect — are not the cute, winged creatures of children's books. In traditional regional folklore, they are small, mischievous beings fond of dancing and wrestling outdoors through the night. They might play tricks on travellers, lead people astray, or occasionally offer help if treated with respect.
The most famous pixie phenomenon is being "pixie-led" — the experience of becoming hopelessly lost on ground you thought you knew, walking in circles, unable to find paths that were clear moments before. The traditional remedy is to turn your coat inside out, which supposedly breaks the spell. It sounds absurd until you have been caught in Dartmoor mist, with visibility down to ten metres and every tor looking identical, and you start to understand why people needed an explanation for the experience.
Fresh flowers still appear on Kitty Jay's Grave near Hound Tor every morning, and nobody knows who leaves them. Local tradition says it is the pixies.
Dartmoor Letterboxing: A Very English Treasure Hunt
If the ancient history of Dartmoor sparks your curiosity, letterboxing will feed it. This uniquely Dartmoor tradition began in 1854, when a Victorian guide named James Perrott placed a bottle at Cranmere Pool — the wildest, most inaccessible spot on the moor — and included his calling card so future visitors could contact him.
Over the years, the tradition evolved. A rubber stamp and ink pad were added, and it became fashionable to leave a postcard in the box, which would be stamped by the next finder and posted from their home town. Until the 1970s, there were no more than a dozen letterboxes on the moor, usually in the most inaccessible locations. By 1976, there were fifteen. Then the hobby exploded, and today there are thousands.
Modern letterboxing combines the thrill of a treasure hunt with the pleasure of a good walk. Each box contains a rubber stamp and an ink pad. You carry your own logbook and stamp it when you find a box. Clues range from straightforward map references to fiendishly cryptic riddles. It is geocaching's ancestor — and many letterboxers would argue it is still the superior pursuit, requiring nothing more than a compass, a map, good boots, and a willingness to get thoroughly lost on the moor.
As a social activity, letterboxing is brilliant. It gives a walk purpose and direction. It sparks conversation and friendly competition. And it takes you to parts of Dartmoor that most visitors never see — which means you end up having the kind of shared experiences that cement friendships. If you enjoy exploring Devon's food and drink heritage, letterboxing pairs perfectly with a post-walk stop at a farmhouse tearoom or a Dartmoor pub.
New to letterboxing? The Dartmoor National Park Authority website has information on getting started, and the Letterboxing on Dartmoor website (letterboxingondartmoor.co.uk) lists clues for hundreds of boxes. Start with the easier ones near popular car parks and work your way up to the remote boxes that require serious navigation.
Why Ancient History Is Better With Friends
There is something about standing in a stone circle or walking through a Bronze Age settlement that makes you want to talk. These places raise questions that nobody can definitively answer. Why did they build the stone rows at Merrivale? What did they believe about the sun setting behind the tallest stone at Scorhill? Were the people at Grimspound happy? How did they spend their evenings?
These are the kind of questions that spark conversation — the sort of conversation that goes deeper than the usual catch-up about work and weather. When you stand in a place where people lived 3,500 years ago, the present moment feels both smaller and more precious. You end up talking about things that matter.
Dartmoor's ancient landscape is also a powerful antidote to the speed of modern life. There is no phone signal at Scorhill. No coffee shop at Grimspound. No gift shop at Merrivale. These places are exactly as they were — give or take a few centuries of weathering — and visiting them requires you to slow down, walk, look, and think.
If you are looking for a way to spend time with friends that goes beyond dinner and drinks, a day exploring Dartmoor's ancient sites is hard to beat. Pack a flask, bring a picnic, wear boots that can handle boggy ground, and let the moor do the rest. Four thousand years of history tends to put things in perspective.
And if the moor gets too wild and the mist rolls in, remember — just turn your coat inside out. The pixies will leave you alone.